Why does CSIS director Michel Coulombe still have his job and — apparently — the confidence of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau?

I’m asking because, last week, the notoriously timid agency tasked with keeping tabs on Canada’s spy service, the Security Intelligence Review Committee, revealed that a CSIS office under Coulombe’s command repeatedly obtained the legally protected personal tax information of an unknown number of Canadians without a warrant.

You’d think that sort of thing would constitute a firing offence for any government official, let alone the nation’s top spy. The fact that Coulombe — who asked SIRC to look into what amounts to the state-sanctioned misappropriation of tax records only after a Federal Court judge started asking questions — still has his job offers yet more evidence that CSIS and its senior officers are immune from any real measure of accountability, under both Liberal and Conservative governments.

Eva Plunkett, the former Inspector-General of CSIS, agrees. In an exclusive interview with iPolitics, the Public Safety minister’s widely respected former espionage watchdog said she wants to know if and when anyone at CSIS would be held accountable for this egregious breach of Canadians’ privacy by intelligence officers who are supposed to abide by the law.

“I don’t know what they’re doing to hold (Coulombe) to account in this situation,” Plunkett said. “You have the senior job, and with it doesn’t only go the title and the salary, it also has the responsibility and the accountability.

“Who is being held accountable here? It doesn’t appear that anyone is.”

Prime Minister Trudeau and Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale ought to remember that CSIS’s first director, Ted Finn, abruptly resigned as a matter of principle shortly after taking the job when it transpired that CSIS had used false information to obtain a warrant to wiretap a suspected Sikh terrorist following the 1985 Air India catastrophe.

If lying to obtain a warrant prompted Finn to resign in September 1987, shouldn’t Coulombe walk the plank today, given that his operation failed to obtain a warrant to collect confidential personal tax information?

“You won’t see anyone rushing to do that now,” Plunkett said. (It’s widely understood in intelligence circles that Stephen Harper shuttered the IG’s office in 2012 — six months after Plunkett retired — largely because she did her job extremely well and without fear or favour.)

‘I would find that hard to believe that it was just one employee,’ Plunkett said. ‘Something of that nature — and this is solely my opinion and (based on) my experience — is not isolated. You don’t have one rogue employee and you don’t have one rogue, overzealous agent up to something like that.’

Plunkett also cast serious doubts on the assurances offered up by SIRC, CSIS and other government officials who have tried to explain away this business as the work of one rogue employee at the Canadian Revenue Agency.

“Frankly, I’m not overly surprised,” said Plunkett. While she was the IG, Plunkett routinely issued reports warning Ottawa that CSIS officers had a troubling habit of bending — if not breaking — the rules without suffering consequences.

In fact, Plunkett suggested CSIS may have rationalized its failure to secure the necessary warrants to obtain the tax records as an “efficient” means to avoid the time-consuming “warrant process.” Whatever the spy service’s rationale, Plunkett described CSIS’s conduct as completely “inappropriate.”

Plunkett said that if she were still the IG, she would launch a “full-scale file review” to determine who was responsible for obtaining the information from the CRA without a warrant and how widespread the practice was — and, if necessary, raise her findings directly with Goodale’s office to decide whether the matter should be turned over to the RCMP.

“The (CSIS) director should be going to minister and explaining what has gone on and what action (CSIS) has taken to correct it.”

Plunkett said that Goodale has been far too publicly circumspect about this business to date. “Beyond saying this is wrong, I’m wondering what the minister is going to do. Has he brought in Michel Coulombe and talked to him and said: ‘What’s the story here?’”

Plunkett said there are still too many unanswered questions. How many Canadians had their tax information breached without a warrant? What was the nature of the information CSIS collected? How was it used? Who authorized the breach? How long did it continue? How many intelligence officers were involved? Why did CSIS keep the information after insisting the documents had been destroyed?

And what disciplinary action, if any, was taken against the CSIS employees who obtained this information?

“(Given) my years of experience, I would take nothing at face value,” she said.

Plunkett also dismissed claims by a CRA spokesperson that the department’s unauthorized disclosure of tax information to CSIS was the work of one ‘rogue’ employee who has since left the agency.

“I would find that hard to believe that it was just one employee,” she said. “Something of that nature — and this is solely my opinion and (based on) my experience — is not isolated. You don’t have one rogue employee and you don’t have one rogue, overzealous agent up to something like that.”

Plunkett knows better than most that in the netherworld of spies, the official story is never the real story.

“The part that always troubled me about the job was not what I found, but what I (didn’t) know,” she said.

We don’t know how, why and for what purpose Canada’s spies peered into Canadians’ confidential tax records without a warrant. The prime minister and Parliament must heed Plunkett’s call to nail down the whole story and hold those responsible to account. And they must do it now.

Andrew Mitrovica is a writer and journalism instructor. For much of his career, Andrew was an investigative reporter for a variety of news organizations and publications including the CBC’s fifth estate, CTV’s W5, CTV National News — where he was the network’s chief investigative producer — the Walrus magazine and the Globe and Mail, where he was a member of the newspaper’s investigative unit. During the course of his 23-year career, Andrew has won numerous national and international awards for his investigative work.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.